Haywire, Brooke Hayward [the best ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

By the time the novices had completed their twenty weeks of training, they were able to swoop out of a pitch-black sky and make a blackout landing in their big North American AT-6’s on a field lit only by a couple of small flare pots. John Swope said the Chinese were the smartest and most disciplined of all, and that although language was their greatest barrier, they understood instruction easily and took to the air as if it were second nature.

Although this De Mille-like enterprise lost money at the start and Father and Jack were deeply in debt by 1941 (“Over a million dollars,” said Father nonchalantly; “don’t tell your mother or she’ll shoot me”), they next augmented the operation with a large repair depot to overhaul engines and training planes. Then, looking to the future, Father maneuvered an Army contract to haul high-priority military cargo over a censored Pacific Coast route, a scheme that resulted in the expansion of Southwest Airways, Inc., into Pacific Airlines, eventually bought by Howard Hughes.

Mother entered into the spirit of the whole venture with characteristic gusto by taking flying lessons and getting her solo license. In 1940, Father was spending so much time in Arizona that she went on a vigorous house-hunting expedition in New Mexico. Always having hated pretentiousness of any kind, with a singular revulsion for life in Hollywood, she passed up all available grand haciendas (sprawling behind their high walls from Taos to Santa Fe) for a spare adobe bungalow on Rio Grande Boulevard in the little country town of Albuquerque, because it had a view of the Sandia Mountains through the cottonwoods in the back yard.

Before Bill was born, Bridget and I were flown there many times with our nurse, Miss Mullens; in those days, commercial airplanes had berths, and we would take off from Los Angeles in the middle of the night, lulled to sleep by the roar of the engines. William Wyler, the film director, who had been briefly married to Mother in 1934 (and was also another of Father’s clients), happened to be on one of these flights with us, and persuaded Miss Mullens to let him borrow Bridget and me for the landing; he emerged from the plane and descended the staircase with one of us on each shoulder, while Mother and Father stood gaping at the bottom.

The first thing Bridget ever said was “Father’s in Albu-quer-que,” and the first movie she and I saw, at ages one and three, was in Albuquerque’s single movie theatre on a warm desert evening while we were waiting with Mother and Father for the train to Santa Fe. The movie was King Kong, which Mother thought we’d enjoy because of the gorilla element. However, Bridget began to scream halfway through the underwater chase sequence, not having yet recovered from her recent chimpanzee trauma, so that Mother and Father, white-faced, rushed us out of the theatre and over to the train station platform. We all sat on a bench under the stars while Father pointed out the constellations he flew by at night and Mother, who claimed to be tone deaf, sang us the only two songs she knew until the train came: “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” (and smile! smile! smile!) and our all-time favorite:

Nobody loves me, everybody hates me,

Going in the garden to eat worms;

Great big squishy ones, little tiny wriggly ones,

Oh, how the big ones squirm.

To celebrate the graduation of the first Thunderbird cadets, Mother and Father gave a tremendous party at our home in Brentwood. Brentwood was then mostly fields of avocado trees. We lived at 12928 Evanston Street, a block down from Jimmy Stewart and Johnny Swope, resolute bachelors who shared a rented house, and half a block away from the Fondas. Across the street lived the screenwriter Bill Wright, his wife, Greta—blond hair wrapped in braids around her head, Bavarian peasant dresses nipped in by laces at the waist, and a fascinating, deep German-accented voice—and their two majestic German shepherds, Sergeant and Major, for whom we had great respect.

Number 12928 was a simple white colonial, set well back from the street; its most luxurious features, which persuaded Mother to buy the house, were the splendid drooping pepper and acacia trees that lined the driveway and spilled their red berries and white blossoms on the gravel. Towering over everything along the street were giant deodora pines, under which Bridget and I once found a hummingbird caught in a carpet of needles, its iridescent blue-green feathers reflecting the sun in such a way that we thought it was a rare creature from the sea miraculously beached on the shores of our garden.

Just before Bill was born in 1941, Mother and Father decided to build an addition onto the original house to accommodate the new arrival. We called it The Barn, and that’s just what it was: a red barn, attached to the main house by an open breezeway, into which we children were moved with our nurse. It was a two-story building, designed with single-minded practicality. The downstairs, left as one great room roughly sixty by eighty feet, boasted a floor that was parqueted in redwood blocks to withstand our tricycles and roller skates, and a long trestle table with benches at which we ate and had our morning lessons with Miss Brown. Two overstuffed denim-covered sofas flanked, at one end of the room, an enormous fireplace and mantelpiece that held my doll collection. The phonograph and a small rocking chair (in which Bill would sit and rock for hours at a time while recovering from a serious mastoid operation when he was barely a year old, one side of his head shorn of its golden curls, to Mother’s sorrow) were at the other. An upstairs balcony ran around three sides of the house, so that we could lean against its pine railings and look down on the entire room below us, or out at the play yard and